Remember the left’s sanctimonious prattle during the Bush administration against its prosecution of the war on terror? Every bit of it was just naked political opportunism. Now that Democrats are in charge, they are doing everything either the same, or with fewer safeguards. For instance:
In a city full of them, Harold Koh is Washington’s biggest hypocrite. As the dean of Yale Law School, Koh was the most prominent critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies, deriding them as “executive muscle-flexing.” The former President, Koh said, was the “torturer-in-chief.” In a 2002 interview with The New York Times, he referred to the war on terror as “legally undeclared” and questioned the administration’s right to kill terrorists on the battlefield. “What factual showing will demonstrate that they had warlike intentions against us and who sees that evidence before any action is taken?” he asked.
In 2009, after the election of Barack Obama, Koh was awarded the job of State Department legal adviser. Since that time, he has defended a war waged in Libya without explicit congressional authorization, drone strikes targeting suspected terrorists and the extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen who had become a leading Al Qaeda ideologist.
During the Bush administration, Koh made the preposterous demand of a “factual showing” “before any action is taken.” Now:
As The New York Times described the administration’s rationale for drone strikes, “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.”
Also, the Obama administration, for political reasons, doesn’t want to send any new detainees to the professional, humanely-run prison at Guantanamo Bay. So instead they’re sending them to a secret prison in Somalia. Hypocrites.
Someday (hopefully soon) Republicans will be running the war or terror again. When that happens, these hypocrites will suddenly find their voice again. Pay no attention to them.
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